‘We were hoping to establish an Islamic state anywhere.” That is how the late Jamal Khashoggi described the objective he shared with his boyhood friend, Osama bin Laden. Yes, that Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda founder and the leader of its global jihad against the United States. Khashoggi was reminiscing about their younger days, when he and bin Laden joined the Muslim Brotherhood. They believed, he said, that if they could just establish a state under the dominion of sharia — Islam’s brutal, authoritarian, and systematically discriminatory societal framework cum legal code — “the first one would lead to another, and kind of have a domino effect which could reverse the history of mankind.”

Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot that we’re not supposed to remember the friendship and Islamist sympathies Khashoggi shared with bin Laden, as recounted by Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, for whom Khashoggi was a go-to source. …

Why are we in this mess? Because Biden, whose administration and party are rife with Brotherhood sympathizers, has made Khashoggi’s murder the focal point of the U.S.–Saudi relationship. Khashoggi was undoubtedly executed with MBS’s approval, and probably at his direction, as U.S. spy agencies believe.

To be clear, I am as opposed as the next guy to barbaric killing. That’s why I’m most incensed by state-sponsored anti-American terrorism. I mention that for some balance. Biden tried to turn MBS into a pariah because he killed a Saudi national. Yet Biden, like his former boss Barack Obama, can’t go fast enough to cut a deal that would rain billions of dollars in sanctions relief on Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of anti-American jihadist terror. The deal would put Tehran’s mullahs on a glide path to acquiring nuclear weapons even as they brutalize Iranian protesters, prominently including women suffocating under sharia strictures — just as they brutalized them with impunity during the Obama–Biden administration.

Attention: There is a civil war going on in the Muslim Middle East. Both sides are execrable, but if one has to choose, Biden has chosen the wrong side, and now America is paying the price.